Competing Expert Testimony

Boudreau and McCubbins (2009) address the thorny issue of competing expert testimony. What they find is that competing/conflicting expert testimony is very difficult for “unsophisticated subjects” (aka jurors) to sort through and then make accurate decisions. And the more difficult the facts, the worse decisions are made. (This is not generally good.) But when experts are told to testify with the threat of fact verification and the competing experts exchange ideas as to why their interpretation should be seen as accurate, “unsophisticated subjects” do just as well at sorting through the testimony as “sophisticated subjects”.